Feedback after tutorials and first 20 hours

I just wanted to leave some feedback based on the things I enjoyed and the things I messed up during my first 20 hours of play in the hopes that the developers might find it useful.

First of all, you've made a really good game. Thanks very much for making it available in alpha like this. Everything else aside, I feel I've got my money's worth and I'm impressed. You should all be feeling pretty good right now. It's a fun game. It's got that "lego" feel about it, where you just sit there taking things apart and snapping them back together to make something even cooler.

I'm playing exclusively survival mode so far and I doubt I'll want to play "creative" based on the fact that I generally haven't found that game mode as enjoyable in Minecraft.

I had a lot of trouble in my first few tries (after watching a few "Let's play" videos on Youtube) when I would disassemble the reactor on the spawn ship and lose the uranium that came with it. Then I'd be trapped powerless in a new base. It took me a while to realise that I could set up a GPS location, then take a second spawn ship and use the uranium from that to get back on course. I'm not sure I'd want that to be *changed* but I thought you might want to know the biggest problem in my first few hours. Perhaps there's an argument for automatically GPS-tagging new stations (or at least the very first one) so if the (newbie) player dies, which he will somehow, he can find his way back?

On that note, the tutorials were very useful and got me up and running quickly. On some games they can be a chore but here they were useful. I particularly liked the way they served to showcase the sheer *scale* of the things that can be built. The only thing that held me up for a while was in the one where I built my own ship, I couldn't launch it for a while because I didn't realise that the "new small ship" landing gear needed to be welded before it could be used. It looked already completed to me and I couldn't work out why "P" wasn't detaching me. Perhaps making that a bit more of a wireframe graphic could make it easier for fools like me to spot that it isn't actually created as a finished item. Something very obvious but which I missed.

I also had an issue in the tutorial where I had to dock a ship with a station and move supplies around, then use them to finish a welding task. I hit "Y" to see what the "turn all the reactors off" thing did. Then when I pressed it again to activate them, the ship came back online but not the station, and all the panels said "Not Online" rather than the mission text. Maybe I'm misremembering or I did something else that was daft, but in the end I had to reset the tutorial.

In my own worlds, I had some trouble with multiple assemblers. It wasn't clear how the "cooperative" mode worked until I searched online; perhaps a tooltip might help there? I also didn't realise that when a task was cancelled in the "main" assembler, the corresponding tasks in the cooperating assemblers wouldn't be cancelled. Maybe that's something worth looking at?

I also found that I had to be close to things in order to build them. That's fine for lightly armoured blocks, but not so great for bigger things like refineries. I want to keep the view of "what it'll look like when it's finished" in place and then step back to see if it'll line up properly with everything else. But, of course, I step back and the build preview disappears. Maybe increase how far away you can build the wireframe for larger objects?

I haven't been able to play with planets. They take an age to load and even then run at something like 0.1fps-- a new frame every ten seconds! That's clearly down to my system specs not being up to the required standard, though I haven't gone through and changed my graphics settings to try and get it working yet; I'm having enough fun in space. I'm hopeful that as you optimise the game more and more, I might be able to join the planet fun but in any case, I hope the overall game specs don't go much higher!

The ship flight is fun and intuitive. I've enjoyed carefully manoeuvring a ship out of my 'base' and I liked the way a fully-laden mining vessel is slower and more ponderous than the same one empty. Mining, by the way, is actually quite enjoyable. The system of conveyors is intuitive, though it took me a while to work out that large items couldn't fit through the small conveyors (Duh!). I like the idea of connectors and I think it's quite satisfying to have several ships and a big "docking pylon".

I haven't yet done anything with NPCs so I can't give any feedback there. Nor have I build any large ships or engaged in combat beyond testing the 'base defence' gatling cannons. Multiplayer is also on the to-do list.

I have lots more to try, and I'm looking forward to it.

Suggestions for the future:

1. Maybe look into "indoors" a bit more? At the moment, I like the idea of having an oxygenated room accessible through an airlock, but I can't see any use for it. (The oxygen creation mechanic is really good, by the way). Perhaps the player could need to "rest" or there could be an food mechanic with hydroponics? I'm not sure. Maybe health could recover faster indoors? Or an indoor medical room might be the only way to get back to 100% health? I don't know. I just know I like the idea of *having* an indoors even if I don't know what to do with it.

2. Keep on doing what you're doing. It's obviously working.

Thanks again guys and good look with the development. If anyone needs me, I'll be 'out there'.

(Edit: Added the thing about the build distance which I forgot to mention initially.)

I had a lot of trouble in my first few tries (after watching a few "Let's play" videos on Youtube) when I would disassemble the reactor on the spawn ship and lose the uranium that came with it. Then I'd be trapped powerless in a new base. It took me a while to realise that I could set up a GPS location, then take a second spawn ship and use the uranium from that to get back on course. I'm not sure I'd want that to be *changed* but I thought you might want to know the biggest problem in my first few hours. Perhaps there's an argument for automatically GPS-tagging new stations (or at least the very first one) so if the (newbie) player dies, which he will somehow, he can find his way back?

On that note, the tutorials were very useful and got me up and running quickly. On some games they can be a chore but here they were useful. I particularly liked the way they served to showcase the sheer *scale* of the things that can be built. The only thing that held me up for a while was in the one where I built my own ship, I couldn't launch it for a while because I didn't realise that the "new small ship" landing gear needed to be welded before it could be used. It looked already completed to me and I couldn't work out why "P" wasn't detaching me. Perhaps making that a bit more of a wireframe graphic could make it easier for fools like me to spot that it isn't actually created as a finished item. Something very obvious but which I missed.

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I agree, the tutorials where very good in covering their subject, except Tutorial 10. I am pretty sure the ship bulding tutorial covers that the landing gear needs to be fully built.

I also had an issue in the tutorial where I had to dock a ship with a station and move supplies around, then use them to finish a welding task. I hit "Y" to see what the "turn all the reactors off" thing did. Then when I pressed it again to activate them, the ship came back online but not the station, and all the panels said "Not Online" rather than the mission text. Maybe I'm misremembering or I did something else that was daft, but in the end I had to reset the tutorial

Click to expand...

It could be that you were connected to the station while pressing Y, which turns off all the reactors, even the ones from the station.

1. Maybe look into "indoors" a bit more? At the moment, I like the idea of having an oxygenated room accessible through an airlock, but I can't see any use for it. (The oxygen creation mechanic is really good, by the way). Perhaps the player could need to "rest" or there could be an food mechanic with hydroponics? I'm not sure. Maybe health could recover faster indoors? Or an indoor medical room might be the only way to get back to 100% health? I don't know. I just know I like the idea of *having* an indoors even if I don't know what to do with it.

Click to expand...

There is a Suggestion forum, Can you suggest it there once you got a concept worked out(but make sure to use the search function first!)?